Another customers garden I designed and landscaped

18 comments

Here are some photos showing a redesign I did of a customers garden.

The photo below shows the garden before and after redesign/planting

The client wanted a more interesting low maintenance garden with a mixture of perennials and shrubs. She found it awkward to cut the lawn around the curved wall so I turned the main lawn into an oval shape and gravelled and planted the awkward shaped parts of the old lawn.

Before laying the gravel I put down a semi permeable membrane to stop weeds coming through and even more importantly to stop the gravel sinking into the soil.

One of my other customers had a gravel garden put in by a landscaper who didn’t use a membrane under the gravel. After a few years the gravel sank into the soil and the ground is now not unlike concrete and is very hard indeed to plant into. Also the garden requires extra gravel to be added every couple of years. Use of a membrane stops this requirement.

When using a membrane all that is required to plant a new plant is to scrape some gravel back off the membrane, make an appropriately sized cross shaped cut through the membrane with a sharp knife,plant the plant,put the flaps of the membrane back into position(cut off a bit to allow the plant more room) and recover with gravel

Here are some more photos showing the before and after of the project

less than a day later!

It is important when planting shrubs to remember how big they will get. The planting above looks a bit sparce but within 3 years the shrubs were almost touching each other.Annuals or perennials which can be removed later can fill in the gaps until the main shrubs grow or alteratively much larger shrubs can be planted but this is very expensive!

Below are more shots showing the finished garden as it was after the planting had matured. This garden is very low maintenance as there is almost no weeding. The few weeds that grow in the gravel can be hand weeded or sprayed. I do the pruning of the shrubs/perennials in autumn or spring depending on the species of shrub/plant and this takes me about 4 hours per year in total

I often hear people saying they don’t like gravel but planted imaginatively it can look really attractive.

• 8 Sep, 2010
• 13 likes

More blog posts by anchorman